We just got a new printer at work or so they say (looks a lot like the old one, if you ask me) and when I went to pick up my prints there was a sign on it that this printer was "in training" for voice recognition commands. Meaning you might have to repeat your commands slowly and clearly so it understands what you want it to do.
Now I am very old school. As far as I am concerned, training is for animals. Not machines. Programming is for machines (and I remember when that was a new concept.). Anyway, I glared at the monster in the corner. Train you? I'll train you! Let me see, there are a few accents that I could try out on this thing just for fun. Hee hee!
Don't get me wrong. I have no desire to go back to the days where monks copied by hand in scriptoriums. It's just that copy machines can be awfully temperamental. If it's humid, they jam. If it's not humid, they jam. If they have a big job, they jam and if they have a little job they jam. If they have a full bin of paper they jam and if they are almost out of paper they jam. After all these years I have gotten quite good at unjamming the printer. It helps that I have tiny fingers that can get into crevices. And I have seen some spectacular jams. I do hope this new printer doesn't have "virgin ears" because it may hear things it wasn't programmed to deal with.
All this artificial intelligence stuff reminds me of a song Allen Sherman wrote back in the early 1960's called "Automation". It's a bit dated but it's still relevant, in fact probably more relevant now. It's about a guy whose secretary is replaced by a mainframe computer. Pretty soon the thing starts coming on to him. "But when it told me it loved me and gave me a hug, dear, that's when I pulled out its plug." Amen.
The funny thing is right now I am reading a book on AI and it's pretty fascinating what is out there right now. I look at all the old science fiction stories and movies of the 1960's and I don't even remember anyone discussing the concept of a trainable machine, at least not in those terms. The fact that we can even train machines--although on a limited basis--is something nobody ever dreamed of 50 years ago. They wouldn't have understood the concept. Computer research was very much in its infancy and tucked away in secret places like IBM or DARPA or MIT. They were exotic, enormous machines and only a privileged few got to work on them.
I had to laugh when the author started discussing the VAX and word processors. Boy, did that bring back memories! I wrote about being waylaid at one rehearsal by some kids who were doing a school project on technology. They wanted to know what kind of computer I used in school. I told them school computers had not been invented yet. It was all typewriters where I worked until 1985. Then they brought in this dedicated word processor called a CPT 8000. You might see one in a museum some day. We thought that was pretty nifty because we could store our work on 6-inch floppy disks and make all kinds of corrections. Before that, as I tell new people, cut and paste was not an icon. It was literally scissors and tape.
But the CPT had one major flaw. It liked to lock up. A lot. You learned to save often, and by often was every other line, sometimes every other word. Because if you waited until the end to hit save and the screen DID NOT go black, that meant all your work was lost. Many were the screams of anguish that resonated in that room. The first time I used a PC and I hit save and the screen stayed the same, I freaked out. It took a long time to get over the conditioning imposed by the CPT where text on the screen meant that it had frozen. Which meant you had take out your disk, turn it off, turn it back on, and insert the program disk and wait for that to do its thing. But on the plus side, it was so easy to do macros on that thing, much easier than Word or Excel. You simply told it to save your keystrokes and if it was being nice it would cooperate. I got it to where I could just sit back and watch the machine run macro after macro, page after page and only have to touch the keyboard once.
Then around 1990 we went to the VAX which was a true computer and that had its own peculiarities but we all thought that was a vast improvement over the CPT mainly because it didn't lock up so much. Now of course we are using PC's. I haven't had a whole lot of experience with Apple products so I don't know if they are better or not. I go with whatever we use at work because it's a whole lot easier than trying to figure out different systems.
But I am not so sure about this training business . . .
Now I am very old school. As far as I am concerned, training is for animals. Not machines. Programming is for machines (and I remember when that was a new concept.). Anyway, I glared at the monster in the corner. Train you? I'll train you! Let me see, there are a few accents that I could try out on this thing just for fun. Hee hee!
Don't get me wrong. I have no desire to go back to the days where monks copied by hand in scriptoriums. It's just that copy machines can be awfully temperamental. If it's humid, they jam. If it's not humid, they jam. If they have a big job, they jam and if they have a little job they jam. If they have a full bin of paper they jam and if they are almost out of paper they jam. After all these years I have gotten quite good at unjamming the printer. It helps that I have tiny fingers that can get into crevices. And I have seen some spectacular jams. I do hope this new printer doesn't have "virgin ears" because it may hear things it wasn't programmed to deal with.
All this artificial intelligence stuff reminds me of a song Allen Sherman wrote back in the early 1960's called "Automation". It's a bit dated but it's still relevant, in fact probably more relevant now. It's about a guy whose secretary is replaced by a mainframe computer. Pretty soon the thing starts coming on to him. "But when it told me it loved me and gave me a hug, dear, that's when I pulled out its plug." Amen.
The funny thing is right now I am reading a book on AI and it's pretty fascinating what is out there right now. I look at all the old science fiction stories and movies of the 1960's and I don't even remember anyone discussing the concept of a trainable machine, at least not in those terms. The fact that we can even train machines--although on a limited basis--is something nobody ever dreamed of 50 years ago. They wouldn't have understood the concept. Computer research was very much in its infancy and tucked away in secret places like IBM or DARPA or MIT. They were exotic, enormous machines and only a privileged few got to work on them.
I had to laugh when the author started discussing the VAX and word processors. Boy, did that bring back memories! I wrote about being waylaid at one rehearsal by some kids who were doing a school project on technology. They wanted to know what kind of computer I used in school. I told them school computers had not been invented yet. It was all typewriters where I worked until 1985. Then they brought in this dedicated word processor called a CPT 8000. You might see one in a museum some day. We thought that was pretty nifty because we could store our work on 6-inch floppy disks and make all kinds of corrections. Before that, as I tell new people, cut and paste was not an icon. It was literally scissors and tape.
But the CPT had one major flaw. It liked to lock up. A lot. You learned to save often, and by often was every other line, sometimes every other word. Because if you waited until the end to hit save and the screen DID NOT go black, that meant all your work was lost. Many were the screams of anguish that resonated in that room. The first time I used a PC and I hit save and the screen stayed the same, I freaked out. It took a long time to get over the conditioning imposed by the CPT where text on the screen meant that it had frozen. Which meant you had take out your disk, turn it off, turn it back on, and insert the program disk and wait for that to do its thing. But on the plus side, it was so easy to do macros on that thing, much easier than Word or Excel. You simply told it to save your keystrokes and if it was being nice it would cooperate. I got it to where I could just sit back and watch the machine run macro after macro, page after page and only have to touch the keyboard once.
Then around 1990 we went to the VAX which was a true computer and that had its own peculiarities but we all thought that was a vast improvement over the CPT mainly because it didn't lock up so much. Now of course we are using PC's. I haven't had a whole lot of experience with Apple products so I don't know if they are better or not. I go with whatever we use at work because it's a whole lot easier than trying to figure out different systems.
But I am not so sure about this training business . . .
